Epagogix is a UK-based company founded in 2003 that uses neural networks and analytical software to predict which movies will provide a good possibility of return on investments and which movie scripts or plots will be successful. It was featured in an article by
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published seven books: '' The Tipping Point: How Little T ...
in ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
''. It has also been featured in ''
Super Crunchers
''Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to be Smart'' is a book written by Ian Ayres, a law professor at Yale Law School, about how quantitative analysis of social behaviour and natural experiment can be creatively deployed to ...
'', Ian Ayres' book about number analysis, in ''CIO'' magazine
and in Kevin Slavin's TED talk.
The Epagogix system uses a "computer enhanced algorithm" which uses data from an archive of films which analysts have broken down into hundreds of categories
or
plot point
In television and film, a plot point is any incident, episode, or event that "hooks" into the action and spins it around into another direction.
Noted screenwriting teacher Syd Field discusses plot points in his paradigm, popularized in his book ...
s, such as "
love scene" or "
car chase
A car chase or vehicle pursuit is the vehicular overland chase of one party by another, involving at least one automobile or other wheeled motor vehicle in pursuit, commonly hot pursuit of suspects by law enforcement. The rise of the automotive ...
". A film's script is assigned scores for these categories by an Epagogix employee, and the scores fed into a computer algorithm which estimates how much that film might take at the
box office
A box office or ticket office is a place where ticket (admission), tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a Wicket gate, wicke ...
, plus or minus around ten per cent. The software may also recommend script changes.
As part of a reported testing process, the Epagogix software predicted that the $50 million 2007 film ''
Lucky You'' would "bomb" and take only $7 million. Upon release, the film took $6 million.
The company also interpreted the software's analysis of ''
Casablanca
Casablanca, also known in Arabic as Dar al-Bayda ( ar, الدَّار الْبَيْضَاء, al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ, ; ber, ⴹⴹⴰⵕⵍⴱⵉⴹⴰ, ḍḍaṛlbiḍa, : "White House") is the largest city in Morocco and the country's econom ...
'' as considering it "gloomy, downbeat and too long".
References
External links
Epagogix Official Website
Mass media companies of the United Kingdom
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